Providing new services may face challenges in creating a common service conception in a diversely owned and multi-technology network of the future. The following are examples of potential challenges:
1. Access/metro and backbone networks may belong to different carriers or business entities. For example, the access networks may belong to wireless service providers, while the backbone networks may belong to a national or global carrier that provides data transport services to multiple access or metro networks.
2. There may be underlying data transport technology differences among providers and also often between metro/access and core networks of the same provider.
3. The combination of ownership diversity and technology diversity is reflected in a more complex set of management interfaces to control infrastructure, and this complexity may create problems if it is reflected upward to the service, business, and operations management layers.
4. There may be a considerable variability in the “value” of service relationships and thus in the per-service handling that can be justified. Some customer data flows may be handled individually (video, for example) and others may likely be handled in aggregated form (voice).
5. There may be regulatory issues such as intercept/surveillance that may have to be applied, or that may have to be routed around to avoid.
6. Since user traffic is transported as IP packets throughout the network, the backbone carriers may not have the ability or incentive to provide special treatment to important user flows. Subsequently, “hot-potato” type routing polices are applied to inter-carrier traffic. The end users can only rely on application-level congestion and flow control, such as TCP, to regulate traffic. This practice may not likely scale or economical as end-user applications become more bandwidth-intensive and delay-sensitive.
7. There may be business issues associated with route selection that cannot be reflected in ordinary IP route processing using mechanisms like OSPF or IS-IS.
8. Services may have to be created at the network edge and border. Service providers may offer new services, such as voice, video, security and VPN, from a network edge. Given the competition from application service providers, the cost in operation may become an issue.
Solutions to one or more of these problems would be desirable.